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The Mike McEwen foursome from Winnipeg sits atop the world as the hottest team in competitive curling. Now they’re getting set to take on Team Europe at the 2015 World Financial Group Continental Cup, presented by SecurTek Monitoring Solutions. “Better let the Europeans know we’re coming to get them,” said McEwen, with a good-natured laugh. […]

When he arrives in the best winter-cycling city in the world, the author of Frostbike is comforted not just by the warmth he generates while pedalling but also by the wisdom of urban planners who put bikes first.

He was the most popular kid in the schoolyard, partly because he was the only one in possession of a long-sleeved shirt. “He used his roll-up shirt to make a soccer ball, using the arms to tie it together,” says Johann Koss of the little boy he met 21 years ago in the war-torn East African country of Eritrea. “They just wanted to play — they showed me that everything was possible.” At the time, Koss was a young man on top of the world, the native of one of the world’s most prosperous countries visiting one of its least. Not long after meeting that little boy and his playmates, the three-time gold medallist in speedskating at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer pledged his $1,500 in prize money to Olympic Aid, a fundraising group formed by the Lillehammer Olympic organization.

CALGARY — Nine months after dissolving a thermal oilsands joint venture in northern Alberta, Norway’s Statoil ASA has put its expansion project on hold for at least three years, citing high costs. The company said in a news release Thursday it has decided to postpone the Corner expansion of the Kai Kos Dehseh oilsands project, a decision that will result in 70 layoffs.

CALGARY — Shares in Talisman Energy Inc. closed more than 13 per cent higher Wednesday after it confirmed it had been talking about selling assets to Spanish energy giant Repsol SA. The stock rose to $11.97, up $1.40, but still well below its 52-week high of $14.05 set in October.

CALGARY — The Thai energy company that collapsed an oilsands joint venture with Norway’s Statoil ASA early this year is investing in a technology touted to produce bitumen without using water and with fewer greenhouse gas emissions. On Monday, privately owned N-Solv Corp. of Calgary announced that PTTEP Canada Ltd., a unit of state-owned Bangkok, Thailand-based PTTEP, would invest an undisclosed amount to support and gain access to data from its 500-barrel-per-day BEST (bitumen extraction solvent technology) pilot plant.

Every now and then, Natasha Gribben feels a pang or two for some of the familiar comforts she grew up with back home in Northern Ireland — traditional Irish music, or soda bread, for example. But the downtown Calgary office worker, who arrived in the city four years ago, can’t think of anywhere she’d rather live and work than in the city’s energy industry headquarters.

Enthusiasm shines through professional reserve when Trent Yanko explains the subterranean rocket science he uses to reopen the Turner Valley black gold reservoir. Deep and horizontal barely begin to describe his designer wells. To visualize the underground trails blazed by modern drilling, first look at that office supply store, says the engineer, pointing down from his president’s suite at Legacy Oil and Gas Inc. Then imagine a sculpture in steel pipe that starts at the store’s parking lot and soars over seven blocks of downtown Calgary to his 44th-floor picture window.

This spring, two high-level Calgary police officials and a City of Calgary bylaw employee flew to Stockholm for a closer look at the Nordic model of prostitution and whether it could work on Canadian streets.

CALGARY — Canadian oil and gas worker salaries jumped six per cent to an average of $130,000 US in 2013 and the trend is expected to continue, according to a survey released Wednesday. Furthermore, despite ongoing worries about oil transportation bottlenecks, nearly three-quarters of employers who took part in the survey by global recruiting firm Hays Oil & Gas say they expect their companies will hire more people in 2014.

Skiing all day in the snow-covered Norwegian countryside was exhilarating, but exhausting, too. It was our third day in a row tackling the vast network of groomed tracks around Sjusjoen, going wherever our whims took us and rarely ending up on the same trail twice.

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